An Action Hero is a woman who has dealt with street sexual harassment by confronting and challenging it. Her final response might have been to choose to ignore the harassment, but she will have chosen to do so, not failed to notice it. (You can also be an Action Hero by participating in our city specific street actions). Different kinds of sexual violence/harassment take place on the street - ranging from the hapless wooer to the aggressive sexual bully. Women in public across the world have their own unique strategies and capabilities of dealing with threat. This blog collects a range of such empowered actions from across the world.

You could also be the agent- the one who collects stories from your city/ neighbourhood/locality/ school/ college/ friends/family/ colleagues/. Ask the domestic help/ vegetable vendor/ flower seller/ woman bus conductor/ anyone!

This means that men are also invited to share stories of women whose response has amazed them! Go ahead... ask all the women you know!Shout out loud! Tell us how and when you felt fearless.

You are an action hero not by the magnitude of what you did but how it made you feel. Write in. blurtblanknoise@gmail.com.

This is an effort to compile an 'eve teasing' vocabulary. statements will be uploaded here. Food here. (Don't miss the song from Prema Loka- here comes a girl looking like a lemon)Movie Songs here (objects / descriptors/coming soon!)If you have been sung to and felt threatened / 'harassed' or even amused- email us at blurtblanknoise@gmail.com . You are welcome to describe the situation and how you felt. We will add the song to this blog post right away! Thankyou!

Haseena Maan Jayegi: I'm sure if I am persistent one day she will be mine.

Khud ko kya samajhti hai: what does she think of herself/ she is arrogant/ let's have some fun guys.

chhai chhappa chhai- (I had short hair and was wearing a white salwar kameez!) The guys tried to follow me for nearly a couple of blocks singing this song.

The statements have been heard by women from across geographies. Over 80 people participated to compile this list. You can still add to it..email us subject titled 'excuse me?'e: blurtblanknoise@gmail.com. You can be anonymous if you like.

Besides being published on the blog, all responses to collectively building the 'eve teasing' vocab will be printed in the form of a book .

12.10.07

It could be anywhere and in any city or town. On a bilboard, in a magazine, on the back of an auto or taxi, on your best friend's t shirt, on the tele, in a movie hall...anywhere!

Do these images amuse you or confuse you? Do they make you angry?

In the Blank Noise spirit we invite you to start questioning the politics of public communication in our everyday life and in our cities.

Who is communicating? To which audience? What is the explicit and the implicit message? What does it say to you about YOU?

Look Out NOW, photograph it and email it to us! You can also send in text to start a debate.

blurtblanknoise@gmail.com

Yes it's not always about 'eve teasing', but it is about reinforced attitudes of relationships between men, women, and cities.

Atreyee and members from the Blank Noise Delhi group discussed the Delhi Police advert on the Blank Noise Delhi mailing list a few months ago

Atreyee Majumder:I was appalled that there was no mention that such behaviour can be criminally punished, and women should take action against these harassers by coming to the police, what is the whole point of the ad then?? Coming as it does from the police!

And of course, underlying the ad is the perception of women as weak and vulnerable, who need to be 'protected', that too in the interest of "shame to the community" that would be caused otherwise, and not so much in the interest of safety of women, right of women as citizens to access these spaces. I smell an over arching sense of women as 'belongings of the community' than as autonomous subjects of a democracy.

Twilight Fairy:"Dont you know how ashamed and embarassed women fell when they are teased? Please protect them and take them away form the scene when this happens"

ashamed?? embarassed? I mean isnt it the eve teasers who should be feeling all this and more? (ok we dont live an ideal world). But even from a female POV.. angry, harassed, provoked, annoyed, frustrated.. these are what women feel... Delhipolice guys need to take some lessons from their own female colleagues.. and just what are these female colleagues doing with statements like " take them away from the scene" going through right under their noses into print media!

Abigail Crisman: These are all stereotypes which reinforce the macho mindset which causes most of these problems in the first place. It shouldn't say, "there are no men in this picture", rather it should be "there are no human beings in this picture" because no one should be able to stand by and watch another person being belittled and harassed for fun--whether male or female.

4.10.07

After a series of articles questioning responses, here are some thoughts on problems are processes that are thrown up in the course of Blank Noise interventions. Comments, as always, welcome. This is by Blank Noise volunteer Ratna Apnender:

The first time I participated in a Blank Noise intervention, March 2006, Brigade Road, Bangalore, it was the most empowering experience I’d had in my life so far. Standing on the street and reversing the gaze, confronting people who felt me up - in whatever ways I felt was appropriate - and, most importantly, simply talking about an issue I had been taught to ‘ignore’ all my life, knowing other people had similar experiences to share.

The issue was pertinent; I had never come across it being addressed before and in this manner. The methods were self reflective, participatory and therapeutic. Most of all it wasn’t NGO-ish and jargonistic. As an eighteen year old in the first year of college who had just begun exploring feminist theory and activism, I felt I was actually doing something.

One intervention after another, and after talking to friends who have been involved with related issues and those who haven’t, I found myself beginning to question certain things that were central to these interventions and central to the direction in which Blank Noise, as a social movement / form of protest seems to be heading.

After listening to countless stories of friends being molested in nightclubs by people they know and being felt up at parties by friends it made me think about how most of us women (and men) automatically demonize the public space, assume that it can only be a site of harassment and proceed to make our private spaces out to be safer and more devoid of harassment than they actually are. Not only are we unequipped to deal with harassment in the private sphere but also more importantly this ignores the presence of desire in the public sphere.

Of course looking hurts. And I have the right to protest against being looked at in a way that violates me and the right to be offended by any kind of looking or staring. But why is it that most of us are usually only harassed when we are stared at by the man from a lower socio-economic strata on Brigade Road and not by the guy on the dance floor in a posh nightclub, or by a woman?

Because you just don’t feel as harassed by the nightclub guy, you may even think he’s cute and that’s how people hook up. Are you not implicitly ruling out the remotest possibility that you may be attracted to the guy on Brigade Road? And that he may be trying to woo you just like the nightclub guy may be trying to chat you up? Especially in a society where the man is almost always expected to make the first move and where no still means yes, where a women who is sexual is seen as desperate, Blank Noise while trying to challenge the notion of a slut may also be restricting the ways in which this can be done by imposing rigid codes of behaviour, rigid codes of what to feel when one is stared at by a man on the road, and also what not to feel.

Why and how are the actions of the man on the street different from those of the man in the nightclub?

I am not trying to say that we shouldn’t feel harassed by non- English speaking lower class strangers on the road. However I am saying that looking at every public space as only sexually threatening and not a gray area where people interact, forge relationships, fall in love, and also have unpleasant experiences, and get harassed, is dangerous because of the assumptions on which it is based. Perhaps worse is the potential for an entire movement to be based on these same assumptions.

Am I also not ruling out that fact that I can be sexually threatened by a woman? That the same stare from a woman may not offend me in the way it would if it was from a man. Again I’m not trying to say that one should feel offended by a woman who stares at you, only that we must wonder why. And acknowledge the shades of gray.

I also want to ask whether this is an inevitable consequence of what Blank Noise is supposed to be doing, or is it because of the assumptions we as participants take for granted and base our actions on?

Is Blank Noise still a form of protest that is responsive and dependant on the social and cultural context or is it just another convenient social issue for us to be involved with, while airbrushing confusion and refusing to challenge notions in our minds before we go out and challenge the street?